GE 14 - Preventing product management burnout — seek renewal as well as rest

Product Managers provide leadership and need to remain positive through the ups and downs of a product’s lifecycle. In times of crisis, the wider team will look to the PM. The feature that didn’t land well, the key opportunity that got away, the doubts that might creep in from time to time on future product strategy. The PM has to stay strong, positive, enthusiastic and committed to staying the course.

Therefore, it is crucial that PMs can manage their own energy and enthusiasm. Continued effort must be sustained over weeks, months and event years. Rest, exercise and a healthy lifestyle all help, but these are necessary not sufficient conditions. In order to really enjoy a long, successful product management career, PMs must identify and regularly participate in activities that provide renewal. Renewal activities act as a break from the stresses and strains of the day to day. They give the brain chance to think about alternative challenges and opportunities. They provide social activity, help get problems in perspective and serve to widen the PM’s network, skills and experience.

The following list provides a summary of some of the activities I found provided these renewal benefits throughout my product management career.

Get out on the road

We know how important it is to talk to users and customers. But nothing beats a trip to see a customer on their home turf. As well as collecting vital insights, you get to meet the full customer team and see the environment in which they work. You get to understand the full context of how and why they use their product. You can look into their eyes when they describe what they like and don’t like and see the passion (or the apathy). Combine a few meetings together on the same trip in the same location and you have a sense of what is going on in the local market and can compare and contrast with other markets you may be familiar with. A trip gets you out of the day to day routine, allows you to connect with your customers and provides valuable thinking and planning time during your travel. When you return, you will have clarity on which things to prioritize and anecdotes to share on why they are important. You may be physically tired from the travel, but you will be mentally refreshed.

Build and nurture a user community

PMs talk about adding value and often equate that to building features. But value can be created in many different ways. One of the most underrated ways to add value is to thoughtfully introduce your customers to each other. By facilitating this meeting, you are providing an opportunity for them to share their challenges and opportunities with each other. To discuss how to get the best out of your product, but more importantly how to get their respective jobs done more efficiently. Scale these introductions, by organizing a local event, slowly building up to city events and then even full-on annual country-wide user conferences. It takes years to build up a passionate community, but the rewards are clear for all concerned. Users get to network, the company gets exposure and kudos within their industry and you and your team get the warm glow that comes from being truly connected to the purpose of your product. Planning and organizing events is not trivial, but you will always finished an event feeling content about a job well done and genuinely looking forward to the next one.

Pick up a new skill

The remit of the PM is so broad that there is almost no function or area where training or study is not going to be useful in the future. Technical skills, conflict resolution, management skills, marketing skills — the list goes on. Pick an area of interest and schedule half a day a week to commit to acquiring that new knowledge. Ensure you tell your colleagues that you will be unavailable and take yourself away to a new environment to study or even better enrol in a class and learn with others.

Engage with the products you use

Make a list of all the products and services you use at work and at home. How could they be improved or enhanced? Where would you take them if you were their product manager? Sign up to their communities, attend their events and submit enhancement requests. These activities exercise the product management muscles without the stresses and strains of needing to prioritize or service the requests. Compare how different companies communicate with you, how they provide new feature/release announcements and how they provide manage your feedback. It feels good to be active and provide useful information to a fellow PM and may spark ideas for your own product or marketing efforts.

Create an email folder and save product communications that you think have been effective. Browse through them when you need to get inspiration for your own announcements and newsletters. You can also browse through the latest product releases on Product Hunt for further inspiration and to see how product marketers position and message their products.

Research a new market, product or acquisition target

Irrespective of your current product strategy or product role, you should always have a research project running. It could be trying to understand a new market, assessing the viability of a new product or investigating smaller companies that could add value to your own product offering. Apart from building up a valuable collection of research information for future activities, the research process in itself is interesting and again will spark ideas that can be applied to your active projects.

Promote quick wins and existing features

PMs can become obsessed with the current features they are building and what they are about to deliver in the next few months. But remember your products already contain hundreds of existing features and capabilities. The reality is that your users are probably only using a fraction of what is available. Pick a few under-used features and quick wins and write about them or organize a quick video or webinar to promote them. It can be motivating to see the immediate benefits that an be achieved without any extra development, testing or technical resource requirements.

Review and revise an existing resource

So many product managers spend hours creating resources such as roadmap presentations, help guides, messaging decks and research reports. But so many of these resources never make it past version 1.0. Why not go back to a resource you have written in the past and see if it can be improved, updated with the latest information or tailored for a specific subsection of your market. In addition to improving the original resource, you are often reminded of your enthusiasm for a specific subject or inspired to create additional resources.

This article provides just a handful of renewal activity ideas, but it is important to find the ones that work for you. Building products takes time and it can take even longer to gain traction — so anything that can help maintain your energy and enthusiasm is invaluable.